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In the wings of humanity's accumulated experience, mutable possibilities glitter under the stroke of the Amber Lord's hammer, and he who bears the yoke of Stratagems watches the ships numbering thousands come and go in deafening silence. Pier Point is, as ever, a dazzling black hole accreting wealth at a rate matched only by the voracious void, and my isn't that a thought for the ages as Aventurine counts the stars in his reflection. Would it not be the most unfunny comedy if the work of Preservation only hastens Voracity's consumption?
A knock sounds somewhere behind him. He hears himself answer in customary grace. This far in Jade's territory, he exchanges anger for aimless, irreproachable apathy. She's given him this gift of a quiet and level of privacy more profound than anything credits could buy, but the cost is, like all things granted by Jade, a burden almost not worth the trade.
He stares at the white patient gown, folded in thirds next to a bouquet of flowering Alaya. He tells himself it is different this time. Here, now, he has a name, recognised by the pious scribes of history. There is no more need for examinations, no more prodding, calloused hands, tittering in half-moon eyes at the edge of his dancing periphery. All directors of The Company must submit to rigorous vetting. That's what they said, yet how many directors wore their sordid biography on spoiled skin pulled taut over too small bones?
The thing the records don't say is how the Avgin knack for reading minds is less mysticism and more diligent observation. Even lies reveal a scrap of truth, and Aventurine knows a thing or two about lies. So when the doctors told him—It's just a routine test—he smelled the putrid rot of curiosity, made rancid by blatant self-interest, long before the vials of his collected blood could clink against their rack.
No. Not again. If he must face these doctors, he does so on his terms, in his own clothes, at the time and place that suits him best. Perks of the position. Belligerence doesn't look particularly good on him, pretty, frail, the runt of the litter, but rebellion tastes of saccharine temptation, a weakness he does well to keep to himself.
Eventually, he settles on a compromise. He loosens his silk tie and lays his golden rings on beds of crushed velvet. His gloves he folds into his pocket, and with a final look upon his reflection in glass rated to keep out the void, he opens the door.
It's an older man who greets him with a gentle, limpid smile under silver-framed spectacles. His sweater is clean, well-worn, of high quality, yet free of any brands or affiliation. He wears no long doctor's coat. When he reaches out first, to shake Aventurine's hand, it's his nails that expose the nature of his work, cracked, dry, roughened by labour.
"You've done well, to have lasted this long," the words register like the slide of a knife, but the timbre is kindly, sympathetic. At the edges of his eyes, his crow's feet crinkle, and Aventurine wonders how many afflicted before him have witnessed the charity of this Doctor of Chaos.
"You've read my file then?" Rhetorical, though the good doctor humours him with a small laugh and a shake of his head.
"Only the parts touched by the abyss. Besides, I would rather hear the accounts from their source."
Without any reason to delay further, Aventurine gestures for his guest to come in, locking the door behind him. The apartment loaned to him as a sanatorium is spacious, providing for each of his physiological needs, though the veneer of a Stoneheart's wealth obscures any personality. Even the paintings chosen by Jade are inoffensive in their unremarkableness, about as revealing as a bowl of diet fried rice.
"Tea?" he asks, a performative normalcy, expecting the decline from busy folk like him.
"No, thank you."
Aventurine returns with a smile of his own, and thus begins their little game of cat and mouse. They sit across a low table bearing two empty cups, the gleaming unfathomable expanse of the subspace barrier playing shadows with wood grain and silver. He asks how they should begin, this being his first time in such esteemed company, and the doctor chooses not to rise at his disdain.
"Tell me about the Border," the doctor says, folding one leg over the other. From the satchel he keeps at his side, he retrieves a rowan box, setting it atop an unused cushion. "What did you see?"
The question itself feels innocuous enough, so Aventurine talks of the nothing beyond, of a vast impalpable emptiness darker than the vacuum of space. It's difficult to say whether his impression of the devouring stillness marked the end of his insignificant mortal comprehension or if there really does exist a yawning horizon from which reality would never escape.
In the first few days of his return, he consoled himself with reason and logic, leveraging the works of the many before him to explain the visions haunting him behind each blink of wakefulness. A certain professor would probably laugh at him for seeking meaning in physics, so when his foray into chronicles of rationality inevitably failed him, he turned to his roots.
Amongst the oldest traditions was the practice of dream interpretation. He has no knack for it, having never been taught nor guided, but they say great intuition comes from careful observation, so try he did in spades.
But the pictures that came to him spoke of nothing at all. There was no wisdom in chaos, no meaning in entropy, no purpose to the lives he couldn't even scrounge the power to save. Intellect and schemes can only take one so far when even SHE can no longer hide from him the knell of a heart that knows Nihility.
Maybe his sin is thinking too much. After all, knowing and believing are two separate things.
The doctor before him hums to fill the thoughtful silence. If he is surprised by Aventurine's forthcoming answers, he doesn't show it.
"A treatment exists," the doctor starts, opening his little rowan box, "if you permit the intrusion. You are right to be wary of those peddling quick fixes and easy solutions, but I assure you this is neither quick nor easy, and the results are mostly down to you. Lady Bonajade would surely have my head if her dear colleague came to any harm under my watch."
Aventurine raises an eyebrow at that. What curious phrasing. To think someone revolting against meaningless destiny would behave so irreverently, it quickens some unseen part of him, the same part that laughs with each toss of the die.
"It's not much comfort to invoke Jade's wrath when I can't tell if you are the type to court death. If I am your endgame, what then?"
The doctor crinkles with delight. "Well, that's a gamble you'll have to take."
The rowan box opens, and out comes a single cluster of ashen violet-grey-white flesh, shaped into coin sized disks held together with a root like the twist of a cyclone. There's no sense in guessing what wild curio a Doctor of Chaos is wont to apply in his daily practice; still, Aventurine cannot help the wariness in his voice as he asks.
"Is that a mushroom?"
Aventurine has many vices, sure. Gambling, the most obvious, his greed like the magician's hand, deceptive. He lies as easily as one breathes, and he has, perhaps, an unhealthy relationship with a six-chamber revolver he keeps tucked under his pillow. Alcohol he doesn't mind, as long as he keeps his edge, but he draws a firm line in the sand at psychedelics.
"Nothing of the sort, Director," and the deference reeks of satire, "it only looks like a mushroom. We call it Chaos Trametes. Cute, don't you think?"
As if to demonstrate the not-mushroom's charm, the doctor holds it up to a ripple of cosmic light, and with a clang like the strike of the Amber Lord's hammer, a thousand colours burst forth from his fingers, suffusing the perforated space between Aventurine's ears.
Aventurine hears it first before he recognises the heat burning across his shoulders or the warmth of his blistered arms left exposed too long to the lash of the midday sun. He hears it—in the haze, in the sky, in the shifting sands wet with the blood of nameless, numbered slaves. It tells him in the thunderous crescendo of the jeering crowd, the wails of gamblers lamenting the turn of their fortune, the din of golden coins changing hands.
In adversity, providence. In conquest, victory.
In ruin, apathy.
In nothing, trust.
It's not that he forgets the grime smeared over his palms, his face. How his chains chitter and bleat with the voices of the dead. He doesn't care because he is not made to care, and when his master lays out a dog's bowl labelled No. 35 filled to the brim with fresh water, he goes to his knees without thinking.
This is when he drinks deep. Of life. Of grief. Of holy vengeance. His master above him, indifferent in the past, at last laughs in delighted triumph. A hand pats his matted hair. He catches his reflection in polished black leather shoes.
"You've made me an even richer man, my lucky hound."
Luck. That's what they all say. But what use is luck without will and careful cunning?
In the roiling sands of his home, the sacred gift of water is never to be abused. So when he wraps his soul-stained chains around a tender neck, he prays and thanks his Mother Goddess for the inch of water that will set him free.
It doesn't take long. He dries his hands on painted silk. Where he'd hoped for some relief, only a yawning chasm echoes back his inevitable, inescapable, insurmountable, inherently unjust destiny.
He's already run the numbers; eventually, the IPC will come investigate. Until then, he forces himself to eat the small slices of chilled meats not meant for him and the fruits cut into jewels and flying birds.
Who finds him first though wears neither the black of Corporation grunts nor the trumpery of senior management. Instead, a genial smile peeks out from behind a paper fan, his golden robes ever fashionable with the betting elite dusting the ground by his feet.
The face, like many faces before him, Aventurine has already forgotten, but the interloper doesn't seem to mind being a footnote in history. Of course, he doesn't supply a name or anything of an introduction, except for a mask of manic laughter he places beside a goblet of gems.
"The Tavern could use another intrepid fool," he says, as solemn as a spring breeze. "There's nothing left for you here, out there, out anywhere. Do you finally see? The universe is a frivolous joke. Life is a grand gamble. Even you understand how trivial are victories when there's no one around to share."
Trivial? Yes. Meaningless? Almost certainly. But the knife wakes him long enough to hear.
"So, what will it be? A chance at preservation, or an eternity of glee?"
The crack of an Imprisonment break shatters the memory. Unmoved from his seat, the doctor merely smiles in blameless elation as Aventurine returns the Chaos Trametes to its little rowan box.
"What did you see?" he asks, undeterred, basking in the trembling silence.
The question is no longer innocuous. Aventurine answers only with tempered steel.
"There is still much to be done. Even if I am the only one left to witness it."
At this the Doctor of Chaos finally laughs, full-bodied and moved to tears. And Aventurine, with a hand at his back and his eyes split wide open, at last truly understands the difference between a fool and the foolish.
"Such stubbornness! Well, that's something we share. When you tire at chance, there will always be eternity."
Somehow, he thinks, he'll win this bet, too.